Obama Finds Predator Drones Hilarious

Some topics are a little too touchy for even the most taboo-flaunting,
back-slapping stand-up comedy routines. President Obama's jokes killed
at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday. But his
administration's highly controversial Predator Drone program does a much
less humorous kind of killing.

Operating for years in Afghanistan and
Pakistan as an officially secret counterterrorism program, the drones have drawn controversy for their
notoriously high civilian casualty rate, the anti-American rage they
provoke in the region, and for the dubious constitutionality of
assassinating foreign nationals. So when Obama incorporated a Predator
Drone joke into his Correspondents Dinner routine, it raised some
eyebrows:

"The Jonas Brothers
are here; they're out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans.
But boys, don't get any ideas. I have two words for you, 'predator
drones.' You will never see it coming. You think I'm joking."

Inappropriate
On Every Level Salon's Alex Pareene retells the joke. "It's funny because
predator drone strikes in Pakistan have killed literally hundreds of
completely innocent civilians, and now the president is evincing a
casual disregard for those lives he is responsible for ending by making a
lighthearted joke about killing famous young celebrities for the crime
of attempting to sleep with his young daughters. (Really, everything
about the joke is inappropriate. That's why you shouldn't analyze humor
too much.)"

The Obama administration has spent a great deal
of time on outreach to Muslims worldwide, and on dialing down the
volume and rhetoric of the prior administration in order to defuse
al-Qaeda's narrative of a clash of civilizations between Muslims and
non-Muslims. So you have to wonder why in the world the president's
speech writers would think it was a good idea to throw a joke about
predator drones into the president's speech during the White House
Correspondent's Dinner, given that an estimated one-third of drone casualties, or between 289 and 378, have been
civilians. It evinces a callous disregard for human life that is really
inappropriate for a world leader, especially a president who is waging
war against an enemy that deliberately targets civilians. It also helps
undermine that outreach by making it look insincere. It's already hard
enough to convince Muslims that the U.S. isn't indifferent to civilian
casualties without having the president joke about it.

What If Bush Had Made That
Joke? Conservative Blogger William Teach poses the
hypothetical, "just imagine Bush telling THAT joke and what the media
would be printing the following day."

...Well, He Kinda Did
Salon's Glenn Greenwald compares Obama's drones joke to President George
W. Bush's highly controversial 2004
White House Correspondents Dinner jokes about looking for the weapons of
mass destruction that his administration had falsely claimed as
justification for invading Iraq. Greenwald
writes, "What
was funnier: Bush's WMD joke or Obama's Predator drone joke? I wonder
how these people would vote: http://is.gd/bSgyA"

Why
Obama Should Drone Strike The Jonas Brothers Salon's Alex Pareene writes, "It
seems like a no-brainer that the people directly responsible for
tragedies should not deliver jokes about those tragedies. That's why Mel
Brooks can tell Hitler jokes and Germans can't." However, "The concept
of the president personally ordering the assassination of the Jonas
Brothers is, you have to admit, kind of funny. Such a terrible act would
also neatly drive home the problem with drone strikes and the
Presidential Assassination Program in a way that Americans and the
popular press would really grasp."